Posts

Neal Kirkwood Big Band: 'Night City' paints an open-ended ensemble landscape

Image
 All sorts of jazz statements can be folded within the contemporary big band, and composer-pianist Neal Neal Kirkwood shows zest for personalizing big-band sound. Kirkwood displays much of the variety of texture, tempo, structure and expanse possible in this veteran musician's first big-band album. "Night City" ( BJU Records)   The new disc brings together compositions he's written for large ensembles over several decades. His sense of jazz history, with some evident roots in Duke Ellington and Gil Evans, is of a high order, as is his penchant for borderline "classical" orchestration and tone poems such as "The Light of Birds," which concludes the disc. Of the several long cuts, I was struck by his evocation of urban sensory overload in the title track, which evokes a couple of firends meandering together around the city. The surface randomness turns out to be tightly constructed, with bits and pieces sensitively juxtaposed.  But my favorite was &

Indianapolis Opera: Placing Bird, alive or dead, while genius flies free

Image
  "Charlie Parker's Yardbird" has moved around the country since its premiere in 2015 in Philadelphia. Last night it was time for the opera to make a one-night stand in Indianapolis, the hometown of star soprano Angela Brown, who has made a specialty of the role of Addie, the musician's mother. The Indianapolis Opera performance was placed at the architectural crown jewel of the historic center of Indianapolis night entertainment and black social life, Madam Walker Theatre . And among the visiting stars who used to play in the clubs in and around Indiana Avenue was Charlie Parker, one of the founding fathers of bebop. Charlie Parker sings of his devotion to his sax.  Parker's life featured moments of triumph and recognition by fellow musicians who saw that bebop swept the cobwebs away from the Swing Era, while at the same time narrowing jazz's public approval by removing the genre from its crucial link to social dancing. Harmonies were thrust away from their

Fonseca Theatre's "Blackademics": Who serves and who is served?

Image
Ann and Rachelle size each other up before ordeal. The witticism credited to poet-critic Randall Jarrell that academic battles are vicious because the stakes are so low has dated rather surprisingly in our era, when larger social tensions raise the stakes significantly in the educational field. The struggle is pitched up toward a weaponized resolution in Idris Goodwin''s "Blackademics."  Fonseca Theatre Company opened the one-act drama Friday night in a production brimful of hip-hop buzz and scrutiny of black sisterhood and academic ambition. The 21st-century stakes are indeed high when higher education's focus on diversity is subject to whims of administrative fashion and political power centers. There are no more tempests in teapots of the kind Jarrell made fun of in the mid-20th century. The focus on African-American literature that Rachelle, an ambitious young teacher, has developed turns out to be too narrow to secure her career as "people of color"

Southbank Theatre Company's 'Man of La Mancha' has breadth of emotional appeal and depth of stagecraft

Image
 Far from my favorite place to see theater in Indianapolis,  Shelton Auditorium  may well be the proper home for  Southbank Theatre 's ambitious production of "Man of La Mancha." The steep pitch of its stadium setting in an expanded semicircle in straight-back pews evokes both sacred and secular traditions. Messages of import, matters for both study and meditation, are at home in such a venue. The stark beauty of the environment has to contend with compromises in comfort and perhaps even safety. Entertainment nonetheless also claims room in Shelton, where this company is in residence. That value is upheld in the way the cast invests controlled energy in the prize-winning musical under the direction of Marcia Eppich-Harris. The peak results in Thursday's opening-night performances were those of Paul Hansen as Cervantes/Don Quixote, Jessica Hawkins as Aldonza/Dulcinea, and Anthony Nathan as Sancho Panza. Alonso Quijana on way to real knighthood under the Golden Helmet.

Dover Quartet, touring with its new violist, gives radiant concert for Ensemble Music

Image
In his concise oral program notes from the stage, Camden Shaw proposed a theme linking the three pieces the Dover Quartet played in its concert Wednesday night for the Ensemble Music Society. Dover Quartet on the move The string quartet's cellist admitted that it's a stretch sometimes to impose a thematic interpretation on a program, but he ventured that the music by Joaquin Turina, Leos Janacek, and Franz Schubert has in common the composers' attempts to "work through something in their minds." The vagueness of that wording nonetheless applied well to what the Dovers offered the audience at the Indiana History Center. He was alluding to how dangerous life's tasks, whether self-imposed or not, can be to carry out or even move toward resolution. Composers work with problems that aren't purely musical, in other words, and they do so through mastery of their craft. By extension, these chronologically distant masterpieces apply well to the magnified uncertaint

Long-form Wynton Marsalis gets a sterling exhibition from ISO's principal tuba

Image
Anthony Kniffen had a helpful composer chat. Wynton Marsalis has grown his musical footprint to become the Bigfoot striding across the jazz-classical landscape. His initial impact as a 20-year-old trumpeter seesawing between jazz and classical performance soon resulted in a decision to stick to jazz. But in making that choice, the now 62-year-old New Orleans maestro as a composer has looked for long-form stature and ensemble splendor in a genre not known for sustaining long forms. Jazz packed with extended solo flights — a la John Coltrane — is not structurally substantial. So there often needs to be programmatic content, particularly on African-American themes, to provide breadth of expression. Marsalis' model has been Duke Ellington, notably in such works as "Black, Brown, and Beige" and "Harlem." Marsalis made his mark on this tradition with "In This House, On This Morning," the Pulitzer-Prize-winning "Blood on the Fields," and "From

Schelle 'visions de l'amenities' at Butler's EDRH

Image
Caught up, as one inevitably is, in Michael Schelle's gift for musical plays on words, I've borrowed that privilege and stretched it to label the concert he called "Schelle, Sasaki, and Friends" in a wretched pun on the French title of Olivier Messiaen's "Visions de l'Amen." Butler University's longtime composer in residence avails himself of the amenities of his professional position, in the dictionary sense of "something that conduces to comfort, convenience, or enjoyment." These human amenities are students, former students, and Jordan College of Arts colleagues, plus his wife Miho Sasaki, assembled for a riotous kaleidoscope of short pieces. They are presumably a far cry from those in the P.D.Q. Bach cantata "Iphigenia in Brooklyn," with its poignant recitative lines "and in a vision Michael Schelle sizes things up. Iphigenia saw her brother Orestes, who was being chased by the Amenities." Collectively Schelle g